November 11, 2016

MacStories Weekly: Issue 56

In this issue: Audio Hijack, Workflows and Shortcuts Starter Pack (Vol. 1), Christopher Hannah’s Home screen, plus the usual Workflow Corner, Weekly Q&A, Tip, Links, and recap of MacStories articles.

A Note from Graham

Sadly, today is my last day as a regular contributor to MacStories after nearly 6 years. Over those years, I have completed my university education and am about to head off an overseas holiday before I start full-time work.

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank Federico for taking a chance on me all those years ago after I randomly emailed him a sample story. It has been a lot of fun working alongside Federico, half way across the world, and have a front row seat as he has grown MacStories into the site that it is today. Thanks also to the rest of the MacStories team – Chris, Cody, Alessandro, Don, Gabe, TJ, Alex, Jake, John, and everyone else over the years. We’ve had a lot of fun group chats – whether it was in IRC, Campfire, Google Hangouts, iMessage (oh God, those duplicated message threads), GroupMe, or Slack.

I hope you can forgive the indulgence, but as I reflect on the past six years, I’m proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish and produce at MacStories. At the top of that list is pioneering this very email, MacStories Weekly, in mid–2014 with Federico. From a simple idea, we turned it into a reality in just a few weeks, and have continued to evolve it for over two years now (here’s what issue 1 looked like).

Beyond MacStories Weekly, developing and refining the Apple quarterly earnings charts has been fun, and I think we now have some of the most informative and best-looking charts each quarter.

Finally, the MacStories articles. There have been nearly a thousand, but here are five from the past two years that I’m proudest of:

Finally, thank you to every one of you for supporting Club MacStories, and reading my articles. I’m sure you’ll hear from me again, but in the meantime, say hi to me on Twitter (@greyham), I’ll be sure to share some photos from my holiday!

– Graham

MACSTORIES RECOMMENDS

Great apps, accessories, gear, and media recommended by the MacStories team.

Audio Hijack

Audio Hijack is my go-to app for audio recording. Whether it’s as simple as recording live audio of a favorite band that posts a concert video on YouTube or recording multiple podcast inputs simultaneously, Audio Hijack’s intuitive building-block approach to audio recording makes each equally easy.

Audio Hijack includes ten templates to help you get started with common use cases. Alternatively, you can start with a blank canvas and drag in blocks to build an audio workflow. As you add blocks, they form connections to show you the steps in your workflow visually.

A big part of Audio Hijack’s magic comes from its ability to record any audio source. The best way to show off Audio Hijack though, is with a couple examples. First a simple one – recording concert audio from a website. The first block is the source block, in this case Safari, which will grab any audio coming from your browser. The next block is a Recoder block that encodes the audio. I’ve chosen 256 kbs AAC, but you can chose from multiple formats. The final block is the output block. Mine says ‘Boom2Device’ because I have Boom 2 installed on my MacBook Pro to enhance its speakers’ output.

My Audio Hijack setup is a little more complicated when I record my podcast, Ruminate. There are two separate workflows running simultaneously. The first takes the Skype call, displays the audio peaks for reference, records an MP3 and sends the output through my USB audio interface where my headphones are plugged in. The second records an uncompressed AIFF file of just my voice from my microphone.

Clicking on any of the blocks in the workflows gives you access to its settings. For instance, clicking on the MP3 Recorder block lets me set the file name including a timestamp assembled using date and time tokens. I also set the workflow to record straight to a Dropbox folder that Robb Lewis and I share. That way, when we are finished recording, the files immediately start syncing to where they need to be for editing. You can even add metadata in the recorder block, like title, artist, and artwork, which I do when I record The MacStories Lounge Telegram audio clips on my Mac.

As with any automated workflow, the power of Audio Hijack comes from setting it up once. After that, there’s no more fiddling when you need to record something again and you have the benefit of knowing that the output will be consistent from recording to recording. But what is most impressive about Audio Hijack, is that it’s a pro-level audio app that does a masterful job of abstracting away its complexity until you need it, making setting up recordings feel as simple as snapping together a handful of Lego bricks.

MACSTORIES COLLECTIONS

Workflows and Shortcuts Starter Pack, Vol. 1

Workflow

Naturally, any collection of workflow apps must include the Workflow app, which as you are probably aware, is a much loved favorite among the MacStories team. I’ll leave it at that (we already talk about it every week), but if you are new to the app, here are some useful resources to get you started:


IFTTT

IFTTT is another longstanding favorite because it provides the connective tissue between dozens and dozens of different online services. As just a small example of what is possible with IFTTT, you can automatically save Facebook photos you’re tagged in to a Dropbox folder, sync all your iOS contacts to a Google Spreadsheet, or get a weather forecast notification every day.

Some of the services which work with IFTTT include Slack, Dropbox, Workflow, Gmail, Trello, Giphy, Automatic, Todoist, Amazon Alexa, eBay, Instapaper and dozens more.


Launch Center Pro

Launch Center Pro is all about surfacing shortcuts to apps and actions so that you save time – particularly on tasks that you do frequently. The shortcuts can be to system actions such as calling a specific contact, opening a link on your clipboard in Safari, or setting your iOS device’s brightness level.

But Launch Center Pro goes beyond just system actions, because you also have the power to interact with hundreds and thousands of third party apps which support URL schemes. But you don’t need to do research on what URL schemes are because Launch Center Pro comes with a handy Action Composer that helps you build the shortcuts. For example, you could create a shortcut that launches Dark Sky to a specific location, quickly add a new shipment and tracking number to Deliveries, or connect to a specific remote desktop in Screens.


Opener

Opener is an ingenious little utility that enables you to open links in apps rather than the Safari web browser on iOS. All you do is copy the link and launch Opener, or trigger Opener from the iOS Share Sheet. From there, Opener will examine the link and provide you with relevant apps. For example, if you have a link to a tweet, Opener will ask if you want to open the link in the official Twitter app, Tweetbot, Twitterrific, or add the tweet to a collection in Charm.

Opener works with dozens and dozens of apps, with everything from ProTube to Trello and Google Maps. It also has the ability to open the Google AMP version of webpages.


Linky

Linky is a terrific iOS Share Extension which allows you to share websites, images and text to Twitter and Facebook. Yes, you could just use the Twitter or Facebook Share Extensions, but Linky is better in a few ways. First of all, you can share to multiple accounts simultaneously. Secondly, Linky is smart and if you want to add an image, it will suggest a few from the webpage you are on. Thirdly, if you had highlighted text when you activated the Share Sheet, you’ll be given the option of including that text, or adding it as a fancy “textshot” image.


Blink

Blink is made by our very own John Voorhees, and naturally it is an essential app in all of our toolkits, particularly for MacStories Weekly. Blink allows you to quickly and easily convert an App Store or iTunes Store link into a link with your own affiliate code. You can do this via the Share Sheet, or just in the Blink app itself.

But Blink can also be useful in other ways. I find the App Store app to be a little slow and buggy, particularly when searching. Blink, which is essentially pulling from the same data, can actually be faster and more reliable. So if I know exactly what I’m looking for, sometimes I’ll just go to Blink because I know it’ll be faster.

There’s also an Amazon store and affiliate link program version of Blink, called Associate.

TIPS

Tips and tricks to master your apps and be more productive.

Selectively Lock Notes

If you want, you can selectively lock notes in Apple Notes, requiring a password or Touch ID before they can be viewed or edited. To lock a note, you need to activate the Share Sheet, and one of the actions will be to ‘Lock Note’. If this is the first time you’re locking a note, you’ll be prompted to set up a password for Notes. Once a note is locked, you will only be available to view the first line of the note (which in Apple Notes acts as the title of the note). Keep in mind that when you unlock a note, it stays unlocked until you lock it again.

SHORTCUTS CORNER

Get help and suggestions for your iOS shortcuts and productivity apps.

Shortcuts Essentials

Automating Bear, Part 1

Bear, a new note-taking app for iOS and macOS I reviewed last week, already offers a solid selection of URL schemes with x-callback-url support that can be used to automate different aspects of the app. While waiting for Workflow to implement native Bear actions, we can use these URL schemes “the old way” to integrate Bear with other iOS apps, and particularly Safari.

Today, I’m going to highlight two URL schemes from Bear’s initial library.

With the first scheme, Bear can grab the URL of a webpage, convert its contents to Markdown, and save it as a note. The primary purpose of this command is to turn web articles into readable Markdownified versions in plain text that preserve links and formatting. You might be familiar with existing web services that accomplish a similar goal, such as Brett Terpstra’s excellent Marky.

The URL scheme is fairly easy to comprehend:

bear://x-callback-url/grab-url?url=

As you can see, all we need is a single url parameter where we’ll pass the URL of a webpage to convert to Markdown. This can be integrated with Workflow in four actions and run as an action extension from Safari or any other app that can share URLs with the share sheet.

First, we can set the workflow to run as an action extension that accepts Safari web pages as well as URLs. This ensures the workflow will show up in the extension both in Safari and third-party apps like Tweetbot. Then, we can use ‘Get URLs from Input’ to isolate the input URL, expand it to the full domain as a precaution, and combine the URL with Bear’s URL scheme. Finally, using ‘Open URLs’ will launch Bear, which will grab the URL, convert it to Markdown, and save it as a note.

There are two optional parameters we could use to enhance the behavior of the URL-grabbing process. Including noimages would force Bear to exclude image URLs from the webpage’s source; tags would let us pass a comma-separated list of tags in case we want to save a webpage with some pre-defined tags. I don’t use these parameters, but you might find them useful.

You can get the workflow here.

In the other workflow I created, we can use Bear’s standard URL scheme to create a new note and integrate it with Safari’s webpage selections to turn whatever is selected in a webpage and save it as a Markdown note.

The key idea is to take advantage of the Workflow extension’s ability to read what the user has selected on a webpage in Safari or Safari View Controller. Using the properties of a Safari web page, we can use the ‘Get Details of Safari Web Page’ action to specifically extract the Page Selection. This item will be returned as rich text directly from Safari; we need to use ‘Make Markdown from Rich Text’ if we want Bear to save the text with formatting intact.

From the same Safari web page item, we can also fetch the title of the webpage by isolating the ‘Name’ detail, saving it to a separate variable.

At this point, we need to mix and match the Bear URL scheme with previously saved variables. Here, you can see one of the many advantages of using Workflow to manage URL schemes: we don’t have to encode anything because Workflow takes care of doing that for us.

Please note: the workflow has to be triggered from Safari with the action extension using the share icon in the Safari toolbar.

I’ve found myself using this workflow quite a bit to save snippets from webpages into the app while keeping their links and formatting intact – something I can’t do with Apple Notes’ extension.

You can get the workflow here.

Saving Tasks with Files to Todoist

Something I’ve recently noticed is that I waste a lot of time uploading files to Dropbox just to add their links as comments to tasks. I often need to refer back to files – usually spreadsheets and PDFs – for certain MacStories-related tasks, and I realized I could take advantage of Todoist’s native attachment feature to create new tasks with files inside.

Unfortunately, the Todoist extension on iOS doesn’t support creating tasks with files passed from the system share sheet. However, its shortcomings can be easily remedied with Workflow and its built-in Todoist integration.

Obviously, a workflow running inside an action extension has no problem with interpreting whatever kind of file is passed to it as a variable. All it takes is setting a workflow to accept ‘Anything’ in the extension settings and then saving the input to a File variable at the beginning. Doing this will grab any kind of file you might share from any iOS app and put it aside as a variable.

Thanks to Todoist’s natural language support for dates, we can be creative and try to type a due date in plain English in an ‘Ask for Input’ variable, which will also save its contents to a variable. You can try to type queries such as “next Monday at 2 PM” or “tomorrow at noon” and Todoist will parse the date and set it accordingly.

Before invoking the ‘Add Todoist Item’ action at the end of the workflow, we need to get the File variable again. This way, Workflow will pass the file as input to the Todoist API, which will recognize it’s dealing with a file, and it’ll save it in the note area of the task.

Speaking of which: in my workflow, I set the Content and Project fields of the new task to use an ‘Ask When Run’ token; this will prompt you to type and pick a task’s name and project every time. If you want these values to be fixed, you can use any other variable or select a project beforehand in the Todoist action.

One last note: you might come across a bug in Todoist for iOS that will prevent you from tapping on the file attached to a task.

In my tests, opening the Todoist website in Safari confirmed that the file was attached successfully, and I could tap on it to open it in a new tab. Todoist will use its own CDN to host your file uploads – keep this in mind if you’re dealing with sensitive documents you don’t want to be uploaded anywhere else.

With this system, I can now create new Todoist tasks with file attachments in any iOS app (but usually my email client) without having to upload to Dropbox first.

You can get the workflow here.

Zapier: From MailChimp Newsletter to Twitter and Airtable

I often get asked how and why I use Zapier for web automation instead of IFTTT or native automation on iOS. Given my increased reliance on Zapier (I’m about to start paying for an Annual Business plan, which should give you an idea of how much I use the service), I thought the Workflow Corner section should be expanded to include Zapier as well. Starting with this issue, expect to find essential workflows and answers to members that include Zapier examples in addition to Workflow for iOS.

Today, I’m going to cover a basic Zapier workflow that runs automatically every week and that should give you an initial idea of the differences between Workflow, IFTTT, and Zapier.

Every week, I want the @ClubMacStories Twitter account to tweet when a new issue of MacStories Weekly has been released. At the same time, I also want to build an archive of issues in Airtable. This is a perfect task for Zapier, which, unlike IFTTT, supports multiple actions after a trigger. This enables us to build simple workflows that perform one action in response to a trigger, as well as more advanced workflows that perform dozens of actions after a condition has been triggered.

Today’s workflow uses one trigger and two actions.

Zapier can connect to hundreds of web services natively, and MailChimp is one of them. Create a new zap (what Zapier calls its workflows), select MailChimp as a trigger, and then search for all supported MailChimp triggers. Like IFTTT, Zapier allows you to choose which kind of condition has to be met for a workflow to be triggered. In our case, we want to choose New Campaign, which triggers when a new campaign (like this issue of MacStories Weekly) is created or sent.

In the Trigger Options step, you can choose which list Zapier has to monitor, as well as the sending status. I picked ‘Sent’ because I want Zapier to trigger this workflow when emails actually go out to subscribers, not when I create a campaign draft in the MailChimp backend.

With the trigger set, we can move to the actions Zapier should perform if there’s a positive match. The first action I added is Create Tweet, which sends a tweet on my behalf for a selected account. The text of the tweet can be edited in the action template, which reveals a major feature of Zapier: fields.

Like variables in Workflow and ingredients on IFTTT, fields in Zapier contain data that can be reused in actions. Fields can be generated by triggers and actions, and Zapier lets you mix and match fields from different steps with other fields and plain text, too. There is an incredible depth to Zapier fields, which I’ll touch upon in future issues of MacStories Weekly.

One of the fields generated by the MailChimp trigger is the Subject of the campaign that triggered the workflow. Using this field, we can then compose a message that also uses my own text to send the tweets you might have seen on Twitter.

At this point, the workflow could be over here with a single action in response to a trigger, but Zapier lets us go further than that. We can add another action to the mix – in this case, Airtable’s Create Record action.

After connecting to an Airtable account, Zapier lets us pick a destination base and table, where we can create a record with Name and Time Sent fields. In the last two fields, we can also use variables automatically generated by Zapier in the first trigger, which will be used to name the record and give it a timestamp.

I’ve been using this Zapier workflow for the past year, and it’s helped me build an automated log of campaign delivery times and a social feed that would have otherwise required manual interaction from me every week.

However, this is only a rudimentary example of what Zapier can do and how we can use it to make web services work for us. I plan to explain and demonstrate lots more in future installments of the Workflow Corner.

Submit a Shortcut Request

SHORTCUTS CORNER

Get help and suggestions for your iOS shortcuts and productivity apps.

Member Requests

Question: I’d like a workflow that I can use to get lyrics of the currently playing song in Spotify. I’ve found one that finds the current song by using Last.FM, but it seems to be broken. Or do you know a better way that would use Spotify itself for the current playing song? (Jeroen Schaper, @Jamushroom)

Spotify prioritizes its own sharing tools instead of the iOS share sheet, which somewhat limits us in terms of how much we can automate, but, thankfully, the Spotify app for iOS can still copy Spotify song links to the system clipboard. And with those links, we can now call the Spotify web API from Workflow.

First, install this workflow and make sure it appears in the Workflow widget. Then, copy a song’s link in the Spotify app for iOS by opening the contextual menu (the three dots) and Share > Copy Song Link. With the link in the clipboard, run the workflow.

The workflow uses a regular expression to isolate the track ID from the spotify.com URL returned by the app. The way I built this regex, it should accept all international versions of Spotify URLs, not just US English ones; track IDs are the same on every market where Spotify is available. With the track ID saved to a variable, a GET request is made to https://api.spotify.com/v1/tracks/, which returns a dictionary that contains values from the Spotify API. These values include the song’s name and artist, which we can use to put together a Google search query.

At the end of the workflow, Safari will open to a new Google search for “song name + artist + lyrics” – in my opinion, the easiest way to find websites that offer free lyrics on the web.

As I’ll explore in the future, this workflow lays the foundation for other Spotify automation ideas that could open up to integration with Apple Music, Zapier, and other web services. You can get the workflow here.

Question: I’m aware of the workflow which lets me download a video from YouTube. Is there any variant which lets me extract an MP3 file from the video? (Ken Ng)

If you have a YouTube Download workflow that actually works (mine have always stopped working) and that returns a video file at the end, this can be done with a single action. Any video in Workflow can be re-encoded to audio-only as MP3 with the Encode Media action. In the action, flip the switch on ‘Audio Only’, select MP3, and you’ll get a an audio file extracted from the video that you can send somewhere else.

Question: I use Spark for my personal email on iOS but the admins at work have the required ports closed. Every time I’d like to check my email, I have to manually disconnect from Wi-Fi, open Spark, check and the close Spark and then reconnect to the corporate Wi-Fi. Can I use workflow (and possibly Launcher) to automate this? (Glen)

I don’t think iOS apps can programmatically handle Wi-Fi connections to disconnect users and connect them to specific networks. All you can do is use Launcher or Workflow widgets (and only the widgets) with the new URL schemes to open Settings in iOS 10. I would recommend Launcher as it doesn’t require you to enter URL schemes manually at all; in the App List of available launchers, look for Settings, pick the Wi-Fi page, and create the launcher. Every time you need to turn off Wi-Fi, you’ll be able to open the Settings screens more quickly with the Launcher widget.

Question: Sometimes I’d like to post a tweet after a certain span of time (e.g. 10 mins). Tweetdeck has scheduled tweets but the feature is not easily accessible on mobile devices. Now, I manually set a timer to remind myself. I wonder if there is a solution for automating the task on iOS. (Jung)

I have a solution that involves using Workflow and Due. I described this method in the past, but it’s worth repeating. First, do this:

  1. Install Due and Workflow;
  2. Install these two workflows;
  3. Don’t change the names of the workflows;
  4. Go through the initial Due tutorial.

What we want to do is use the first workflow to schedule the tweet and save it in Due, which, at the due time, will fire off a second workflow to send the tweet.

In the first workflow (Schedule Due Tweet), type the text of your tweet, then open Due. In the app, you’ll see that a reminder will be saved alongside a Workflow URL for later. Here, you can also choose when you’d like to schedule the tweet.

At the scheduled time, you’ll receive a Due notification. Open it, tap the checkmark button to mark the reminder as done, and Due will offer to open the Workflow URL.

Tap the URL, and the second workflow will be launched, showing the system tweet sheet with your text already filled-in.

After sending the tweet, you can go back to Due, make sure the reminder is complete, and schedule as many tweets as you want with this combination of Workflow and Due.

Question: I have two remote printers that I need to have print something every two weeks or the ink will dry up. I can print remotely by sending an email to the Internet connected printer’s email address (i.e. xyz123@print.epsonconnect.com). I would like to have an email automatically sent every two weeks to the printer’s email address. (Josh Wise, @joshdwise)

If you don’t want to use an approach similar to the Due workflow I described above (schedule every 2 weeks, and instead of a tweet, send an email from Workflow), we could use Zapier’s scheduled automation to let the process be entirely automated – with the only caveat that you’ll be limited to sending one email every week instead of every two weeks.

Zapier has a Schedule action that can be used as a trigger. Essentially, this lets you create a trigger that is activated at a specific time every day, week, or month (alas, there’s no custom option).

After selecting a scheduled trigger, you can either use Zapier’s Email action or your own Gmail account to automatically send an email to a specific address – in your case, the printer’s.

In the email template on Zapier, simply fill in the To, Subject, and Body fields, save the zap, and turn it on. Every week at the scheduled time, the zap will run (you won’t have to remember to run it), and it’ll send an email to your printer.

Submit a Workflow Request

Submit a Shortcut Request

WEEKLY Q&A

Your weekly correspondence with the MacStories team.

Question: Every night, I text my mother in law to tell her my son is going to bed so that she can call him and tell him goodnight. I love using Siri for this, but, to my frustration it spells my son’s name wrong, instead of Reid, it spells Read. I have tried to create a contact for him and tweak the phonetic spelling to Reed or Read but I can’t seem to fix it. do you have any suggestions? (Chad Wollenberg, @chadlenberg)

Like you, I have also come across this problem, only with the abbreviation of my last name as “Ticci”. I solved it in a couple of ways and I’m not sure which one worked because the system is opaque.

I went into Settings > General > Accessibility > Speech > Pronunciations and added spelling for my name; I added a nickname to my contact card; and, I also taught Siri via voice how to say my name. If neither of these work for you, I honestly have no idea what else could fix it.

Question: At work we use a shared (Exchange) calendar to manage a roster, a regular cyclical schedule, team leave, plus key events. All of these items are set up as “all day events” which most calendar apps will display in a block at the top of the screen. I have been looking for years for an iOS app that gives plenty of room for these types of appointments, but all I have tried so far either cut them off or force me to scroll a limited area (Apple’s does this). It’s not unusual to have 4 or 5 such appointments appear on a single day. Have you come across a decent iOS calendar app that will adapt well to this type of calendar use? (Allister, @zkarj)

I’m not sure if this could be what you’re looking for, but Week Calendar for iPhone lets you alter the size of the area dedicated to all-day events, with the highest setting giving the all-day tray the equivalent of 6 rows.

If you have multiple all-day events, they will be stacked together in this area. If Club members have other suggestions for calendar clients that put more emphasis on all-day events, I’d love to know.

Question: Is there a way to add multiple items to a Todoist project? Example: milk, bread, ham. (Renato Vanzella Filho, @renato_vanzella)

At the moment this is only possible from the web-based version of Todoist using the ‘Add Task’ link. The feature is not available on the iOS or macOS versions of Todoist and is not available if you use Todoist’s Quick Add feature on the web, but if you paste multiple lines of text from the ‘Add Task’ link, Todoist will ask if you want to add them as separate tasks. Choose ‘Ok’ and each line will appear as a separate task.

Question: I still use RSS as my main news clearing house. I have some workflows to get interesting stories and images into my Apple Notes notebook. Mr. Reader worked great for that, but I was surprised to see it is no longer going to be supported. Any suggestions on a replacement? (Danial)

I recently switched to Inoreader for RSS feed reading because of its power user features. Using a combination of rules and tagging, which are accessible from Inoreader’s web app under ‘Preferences,’ I can automate the process of pulling just the articles I want to see from a large number of feeds. Inoreader makes a separate RSS feed available for each rule you set up, which is useful for piping the results into another app, like Notes, using Workflow.

Submit your own question

THE ALBUM

We love stickers in iMessage, and here we'll share some of our favorites.

Mallow & Puddin’

Cute new stickers from The Iconfactory, showing an adorable cat and dog doing different things such as drinking coffee, eating, sleeping, and even using a MacBook. You can never have enough dog or cat stickers on iMessage.

Banana Animated Stickers

A shark’s fin circles your conversation, but it’s not a shark’s fin, it’s a banana. A guy does a kick flip with a banana, while another rides a banana-bicycle. Banana Animated Stickers is a strange and wonderful sticker pack.

APP DEBUTS

Noteworthy new app releases and updates, handpicked by the MacStories team.

Battle Bash

A delightful Advance Wars-like game that plays entirely as a turn-based iMessage game. In Battle Bash, you’ll move your troops on a map that hides enemy characters until they’re in sight. Simple controls and good use of custom iMessage bubbles to share game progress.


Sylo

Sylo wants to be a unified music player for iTunes content, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, and more. For better sound quality and to download songs for offline listening, you’ll have to sign in with a Spotify Premium or SoundCloud Go account. There’s also an iMessage app to share songs with your friends.


Altershot: Screenshot Editor

If you want your screenshots to look more professional with a clean status bar, Altershot is the utility you’ve been looking for. The latest version has added a Photos editing extension, support for Apple Watch screenshots, and other improvements for iOS 10.


PayPal

The latest version of PayPal’s iOS app has added SiriKit integration so you can send and request money via voice. Thanks to iOS 10, your payments and money requests will be previewed natively in Siri without opening the PayPal app.


F1 2016

The racing game that was previewed at Apple’s September event has been released on the App Store this week. F1 2016 takes advantage of Metal and the A10 chip, augmenting the experience with haptic feedback on the iPhone 7. It looks glorious.


Rebrowse

A clever implementation of two iOS APIs: Rebrowse lets you record web browsing through Safari View Controller and ReplayKit, two native iOS system features. After browsing the web in Safari View Controller, you’ll be able to preview a video of the session and share it (or save it locally).


Qwiki

Qwiki, a macOS menu bar utility for searching and linking Wikipedia articles, received a nice update this week. Since I covered Qwiki earlier this year, its developer, Chris Hannah, has added a welcome option in settings to open search results inside your default browser instead of Qwiki and keyboard navigation of search results. This week, Qwiki 1.2 added support for every language that Wikipedia does and the ability to set Qwiki to launch at startup. Combined with earlier updates, finding reference material with Qwiki is faster than ever before.

MEMBER STORIES

Interesting stories from Club MacStories members.

Story: Mikey Reiach

Twitter: @mikeyReiach. Club MacStories Member.

Hey Ticci,

I’ve read your site and listened to you on podcasts for a while – sent some feedback and follow-up in the past – and know how you like the integration of the iPad with work. I thought you may be interested in how I use mine.

To start off, I’m an electrical engineer in the construction industry and it’s more prevalent than ever that iPads are getting to be an essential tool on a job site. The combination of the weight and processing power of the iPad Air (2) with iOS have made it practical to carry an iPad around all day for work.

Being the under–30 guy on site, I’ve been thrown into the impromptu “IT Dept”. The company bought ten iPads and I had the task of setting them up. I quickly learned about Bushel (recently renamed to Jamf Now) and used the resources available to manage the iPads like Blueprints and then had to figure out how to make them useful in the field. Colleagues in different roles have different needs for the iPads, but the main areas that I see the iPad excel are drawings, quality control/commissioning, and office administration.

Drawings

To premise, the company I work for has produced over 400 drawings for the current project we are building. That’s just the electrical work. It doesn’t take into account the architectural floor plans, elevations, details, mechanical drawings, etc. That’s the first benefit of having the iPad – every detail that’s been put onto a drawing is available at your fingertips. The construction site is multiple buildings with different electrical systems for each.

Our head office is usually in a different city than where the construction site is. Most of the design work is done in the office and must be couriered out as physical printed drawings for work in the field. On the most recent project, we’ve also been PDFing all the drawings as they are issued and storing them online to have the most up-to-date drawings available on a computer or iPad screen.

The PDFed drawings are saved in a Dropbox Team folder that’s shared with any account owned by colleagues who need to see the drawings on their iPads. Using GoodReader, the drawings are synced and downloaded locally onto the iPad every 12 hours (as long as there is Wi-Fi). Keep in mind that there isn’t much Wi-Fi in a building under construction. So a lot of the data has to be stored locally. GoodReader has the ability to keep multiple tabs with different drawings open to easily flip back and forth.

The iPads are great for consulting drawings in a reference situation. Any of the foremen with an iPad can easily look up something quickly to answer a question from a worker, but I wouldn’t recommend to try and build a building with just the iPad at the moment. The physical drawings are better to hand to a tradesman in order to do his planning, gathering material and conducting his work. Viewing drawings is easily the most used feature.

GoodReader also offers the option to annotate drawings. You can scribble, overlay text, highlight, draw arrows, ovals and a bunch more. With GoodReader’s ability to also upload and sync with Dropbox, each user is able to make their personal annotated copy of a particular drawing stored in their Dropbox account. From there, it can be shared or replace the master drawing in the shared drawings folder.

On a normal day when I am planning on doing some inspections and commissioning, depending on the task that I set for myself, I will force a refresh in GoodReader and open the appropriate PDFs on their own tabs. I could have 7 tabs open with all the different systems (e.g. power, lighting, fire alarm).

At the same time, we have a lot of Excel spreadsheets to keep track of the commissioning process. Those files are also hosted on Dropbox and are opened in the Excel app. Now, with iOS, I can have GoodReader open and slide over Excel to fill in the necessary fields for the progress of the system in that area of inspection. I can easily move the view of the drawing as I advance through the building while Excel remains open in Slide Over. I really like not having to double-tap multitask between apps.

As I progress through the day, I update a Notes document that was created every morning. It’s a quick note made on my Mac at my desk from a TextExpander snippet. The title is simply the date and the body is a Checklist for the day, a “Go - No Go” list and notes at the end.

As I inspect rooms and systems, filling in the right fields for Excel, the room inspected goes under the “Go” title if it passes. If there is still some work that is needed, the room in question is put under the “No-Go” list. At the end of the day, I consult that Notes document to wrap up what can be signed off and what needs to be sent back to the workers for completion on a following day. These notes have turned into a daily journal for me. I can easily search for a room in my “Site” Notes folder to remind myself of any notes I made previously and recall some history.

If I do see an issue or need to clarify something for myself when looking at the physical installation, I will take a picture of the problem in Annotate. Using another TextExpander snippet, it automatically inputs the date, time, and moves to the second line where I can input where the picture was taken. Then, I save the picture to my Camera Roll for viewing at the end of the day when back in the trailer. After consulting my Notes and pictures in Camera Roll, I decide what needs to be put into OmniFocus to consult the following days.

With the recent improvements of Notes, I can include images or scribbles. But I can also share notes with colleagues on the field. I can quickly type up a small checklist of deficiencies and share it with the foreman on the floor. It will available on his iPad and he can make notes, check items off, add pictures, or scribble. I can easily see his progress as it’s updated on my Mac and iPad in my Notes.

During these inspections, I’m consulting multiple drawings. Some are in GoodReader, as mentioned previously, but I also view some detail drawings that are saved for offline use in Dropbox. These details can be the cross-section of a wall, how a door is assembled or millwork. Using the 4-finger swipe to switch between apps, I can look up a detail quickly and then go back to the bigger floor plan drawings.

As said before, there are a lot of drawings. To avoid confusion and overload, I’ve only allowed the foremen’s iPads to have access to a subset of those drawings. There is the odd time that a foreman will ask me for clarification or a detail while I’m walking on the floor. This is where we pull out the iPads to work through the details. He will have the drawing of the floor plan open while I look for the detail drawing he’s looking for. Once found, we can discuss it and if the foreman wants that detail drawing, I can easily AirDrop it to him. AirDropping one drawing still limits the number of drawings that he has to manage which is preferred by all. Sometimes, I would even just screenshot the very particular detail and only AirDrop that image.

There has been an instance where a foreman wanted all the ceiling layout drawings while we were walking on the floor. I had them stored in a folder in my Dropbox, but synced locally in GoodReader. I only had to zip the folder (in GoodReader) and AirDrop it. It was a 75 MB file that took no time to AirDrop, with no Wi-Fi involved and once he saw the prompt on his iPad, he opened it in GoodReader and was able to continue his work. I haven’t used AirDrop much in the past, but it’s so useful to share documents especially on a construction site with no Wi-Fi.

Quality Control & Commissioning

On occasion, there have been times where I conduct a field survey of one particular thing multiple times throughout the building. For example, I may have to check all installations for A/V systems before the drywall is put up. Using Annotate with a TextExpander snippet, I can take images of each installation with the date, time, and location overlaid on the image. To keep a record, I’ll make a Dropbox folder and using a workflow, I can select all the relevant images, resize them, change the title to the creation date and time, and then store them in that new Dropbox folder. So awesome! Now, I can recall any of those pictures at any time to confirm the installation of the electrical work without having to rip open the walls to look inside again. In the past year, I have taken about 2,500 pictures of construction installations.

When the construction phase is coming to an end, we need to commission the building by verifying that the building is built to the specification documents and drawings. There is a new-ish app called FieldWire that’s built for managing construction project. Our company partners have an enterprise account with FieldWire that hosts a database with all of the construction drawings and tracks deficiencies. All the contractors on the site are users of the shared database. There is a web app to view the construction management but the iPad app is more widely used.

Between the construction partners, we’ve developed a workflow that would keep track of deficiencies. On a floor plan of the interior wall structure, we can drop a bubble and assign it to a contractor with a description of an issue. The bubble can have checklists, files and photos attached to it and can have different priority levels. This is synced through all the different contractors and subcontractors that are signed up for the FieldWire system. We have about 50 different contractors linked with our construction project. Once the issue is cleared, it can be marked as complete on the FieldWire database to be verified by another party.

Office Administration

The iPad comes in super handy for foremen as well when it comes to office administration work. I realize now, when you hand a foreman an iPad, you’re handing over a complete computer. They are able to access their email with Outlook, make reminders, maintain their calendar, manage documents in Dropbox, view and edit spreadsheets for material and labour with Excel, and view and write documents in Word.

Along with drawings, I should mention that we have numerous documents to keep track of progress and installation wiring schematics that are all at your fingertips in an instant. Harmon.ie is great for document managment. An example would be door installations. Every door on this job has a database number. I can easily call up that door number and it tells me everything I need to know about that one door: what lock, does it have a card swipe, mag-lock, whatever.

Every so often, the foremen will want to print out spreadsheets, documents, or emails and that’s why we bought an AirPrint printer. Again, I didn’t really think of the convenience of AirPrint, but when you have more than 10 iPads running around a job site, it comes in handy. The foreman just has to walk into the office trailer with the AirPrint printer, see the option in the Print dialog on their iPad, print and walk away. They don’t need help from anybody or no longer need to ask somebody at a computer to print out something for them. Brother also has the open to scan documents using their iPad app.

Also, when issuing a new iPad to a foreman, we try to include the Logitech BLOK Protective Keyboard Case. I’m surprised with these cases. We’ve had drops with no ill effect to the iPad at all and the keyboard makes the iPad a more self-sufficient computer for the workers to manage. The keyboard takes away the distraction of more senior workers having to type on a glass screen. And it’s just faster for everybody.

iPad Pro 12.9-inch?

I’ve wondered, “Would an iPad Pro 12.9-inch be more beneficial?”. I mean, the drawings that we deal with are huge pieces of paper and the iPad Pro 12.9-inch has a bigger screen. But, the portability factor goes way down for the iPad Pro. My iPad lives stuffed in a pocket in the back of my safety vest. The iPad Pro wouldn’t fit comfortably in the pocket and would be obnoxious trying to hold walking around.

There have been occasions, while at a meeting sitting around a conference table, to pull out iPads to work through an issue. And a bigger iPad on the table has more screen real estate for viewing which sounds great. But in my experience on this job, if it takes more than 2 minutes, it’s easier to grab the actual print for collaboration and markups.

No doubt in my mind that the iPad Pro 9.7” would be better for performance on the job; unfortunately, they weren’t available when we purchased the iPads. So, hopefully, in the future I’ll try conducting a job with the Apple Pencil, too.


Tidbits

There are other tidbits to using the iPad on site that don’t warrant a whole section, but a few that come to mind are:

  • SwiftKey keyboard for quick input;
  • Finding lost iPads around site with Find iPhone;
  • Use the iPad Air 2 as a second screen using Duet;
  • Check the Weather for exterior work;
  • FaceTime an engineer for installation advice to save a trip out to site.

Wrapping up, there have been the odd one of two iPads on a construction site previously. But this has been the first job where iPads were dominant. The integration of a good PDF viewer and annotator, online storage, office suite, construction management software in the tiny iPad form factor with all day battery life, a camera, AirDrop, and AirPrint is incredible.

Hardware

Apps Used

HOME SCREENS

Friends of MacStories share their iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch Home screens.

Christopher Hannah

Twitter: @chrishannah. Developer of Qwiki, writer at RadicalThinker

With the iPhone 7 being released, I took that as my chance to join the infamous Plus Club. And with that, I thought I would look at a different way to organise my Home screen as my previous 5S was just one page of well categorised folders. With this new shiny toy, I started fresh with a Home screen of my most used apps.

As you can see, the first three apps are Phone, Messages, and WhatsApp. They’re sort of standard for me, as I’m always going to use them (except, maybe, not so much Phone). Then there’s Clock, because we all need to get up in the morning. Fantastical and Dark Sky are also two of my staple apps – they do very small tasks, but extremely well.

Of course, I need Photos and Music (I’m an Apple Music subscriber), but my video consumption is usually via Infuse, which is a great app – especially as it lets me store everything on a NAS drive. Overcast is what I use for podcasts.

I’m a big RSS reader, and my app of choice is Reeder. It makes text look really nice (particularly in dark mode), and also lets me use my Feedly account so I can move between devices really easily. Nuzzel is there for the occasional read, when I’m interested to see if anything interesting has popped up on Twitter. And if I’m feeling bored, I’ll usually check out /pics or /ProgrammerHumor on Reddit.

I’m a big Arsenal fan, so Sky Sports and the Arsenal app are required to keep up to date on everything football.

Then there’s the camera apps. I use the default app for most things. But seeing as I have the 7 Plus, I thought I’d try to a bit more photography stuff, and I’ve always heard good things about Obscura. So I’m trying to use that more and more.

I’m 24 years old, so of course I’m on Twitter and Instagram. Tweetbot has been my client of choice for years, and, well, there’s Instagram. Snapchat is more of an experiment, and it’s only on the Home screen to try and force myself to use it more.

My “producivity” apps would be Workflow, Airmail, and Tasktic. Everyone needs email, and Airmail does it so well, especially with the huge action menu. Tasktic is what I use to track what I need to do, and it’s developed by a friend of mine! Workflow needs no introduction here, but I’m always moving towards a more automated lifestyle, and this app is a necessity.

I don’t play many games on my iPhone, so that’s why it’s just PewDiePie’s Tuber Simulator and Pokemon GO sitting at the bottom. I much prefer to play on the iPad where I have a bigger screen, but maybe this will change with the Plus.

Submit your own Home Screen